Neighborhood Pedestrian Plazas to Become More Affordable

New York City’s pedestrian plaza program has been embraced by retailers and real estate interests in some of the city’s priciest areas, like Times Square, Herald Square and the Meatpacking District.

Jason Andrew for The Wall Street Journal

Queens Plaza is pictured in July 2012. Columnist Ralph Gardner wrote about the plaza’s $45 million makeover last year.

On a bustling plaza in Corona, Queens, on Tuesday, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and community leaders explained how they think these pop-up public spaces can spread to less affluent corners across the city.

Ms. Sadik-Khan announced an $800,000 grant from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which will seed a new Neighborhood Plaza Program intended to help communities that want pedestrian plazas to cope with the cost of maintaining them.

The program, to be managed by the Horticultural Society of New York, will offer guidance to groups of businesses that want to sponsor and launch pedestrian plazas, and also offer maintenance workers at a lower-than-average cost to help defray one of the biggest expenses of the plazas—keeping them clean, equipped with places to sit and stroll, and well-planted with shrubs and flowers.

“We can’t have a public space program that’s only in areas that have the financial resources to do it,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said, noting that the plaza on which she stood would have been, 18 months earlier, in the middle of an active street. “It can’t be only in areas with a business improvement district. We actually have to have a public space program that works in every single community.”